and I don't like it. I have been using Mandriva Linux for the last 6 years now, and really like it. Amarok has been one of the best music organizing software I have found for all of my downloads and CD ripping SoundJuicer is easy to use. But after the last upgrade, the no sound problem has fallen upon my KDE sound system. Windows XP has sound, not linux... . After every thing Ix And I can think of trying, I got the bright idea the on board sound might be on some how, conflicting with the SBlaster Audigy sound card. Happened before. After looking for, and not finding a jumper and looking for a "disable" in the bios, it was discovered there is no feature to turn off on board sound. So we up graded the bios and now have a way to disable the on board sound system. Yea... right? Wrong! Now Linux will not boot. Grub come up and I can select WindowsXP and it boots right up... no problems with Windows. We tried booting up linux Rescue, will not boot, tried running linux installer, will not boot. Nothing of linux will boot. Could this be that Windows bug in the bios to stop loading any other OP System? Hummm...

We will try to reprogram the bios with the old software to see if linux comes back. But if I can't fix the sound problem this may be the end of Linux for me.

You could try with the wubi installer. It installs Ubuntu from windows.

My guess is that you're doing something wrong, but anyway: which motherboard and BIOS revision we're talking about?

Ok, Here's an update; The mother board is a Biostar TA690G AM2, CPU is a AMD Athlon 64 dual core. We updated the bios to R69AMC13 and lost Linux, could not boot, flashed to early revision R69AMB15, and Linux could still not boot. We flashed the Cmos once again back to the original revision and now Linux boots. The only reason I had to update the bios was to disable the on board sound or to be sure it was disabled. Linux now boots and no sound. Well, no sound from the front jack (green) but sound from the rear channel jack (black). Hummm. Still not right, keeping in mind all has worked before the last update.

But what about the bios update? No Linux aloud? The sound IS a Linux issue... interesting.

If you're getting sound out of one of the channels then it may be working, but may need configuring a bit. Check the output (green) from onboard for sound - if there's sound there, then something odd is happening. If not, try using a mixer to up the volumes on various channels, and also check what driver is being used (Hardware in the Control Center should say).

It's not muted is it?

Give us real information and details."it doesnt work" tells nothing useful.

What update broke it?
Is linux offering any errors?
Output of dmesg and lsmod

You can just blacklist the module for the sound card you don't want and linux will ignore it, no need to mess about in bios. But if you still want to do the bios update.... you could provide us actual errors from the boot "it didn't boot" says nothing.

James

But James, that's just it, there are no errors. Nothing to tell me what is really happening, what can I say? When I say the system will not boot, that's exactly what's happening, no boot, no errors with the updated bios. Grub comes up and when you chose Linux, the screen goes blank and nothing happens.


tyme; that was the first thing I looked at, to see if I was getting sound from the on board sound... nope, no sound. It wasn't till I flashed the Cmos that I was able to check the mother board sound, it was on, the original bios had no sound features. ??? With the original bios back in place, now I have sound in linux, rear channels work, no front channels. Kmix shows no muted inputs. Hardware in the Control Center shows the same thing. Same driver is being used as before the last update...


BTW; Have the "auto update" on.

Found the problem... Under Kmix / Switches / IEC985 Optical RAW was on. Never seen this before and don't really know what it is, but when it's on, the front channel disappears. Ha! That make me happy!

It enables digital output, via the SP/DIF jack on your card. Most cards can't output over the analog jacks and digital at the same time, so there's a mixer setting that flips between the two.

on my laptop it just flicks a nifty little red light on and off

Now that I'm aware of this... I like to know how this feature got switch on?

In my experience it's on by default. I always have to turn it off when I install a distribution (at least, Mandriva) or else I get static out of my speakers. Didn't think of it in this instance because you didn't report any static (which is what I would have expected).